South Side board re-elects president, vice president

December 4, 2012

At its annual reorganization meeting, South Williamsport School Board unanimously re-elected John Engel as president and Don Lowe as vice president.

Engel has been on the board since 2001 and has seen the board turn over since then.

"One thing that remains is everyone remains individuals," he said at Monday night's meeting.

He was "really glad" board members spoke up at meetings on behalf of their constituents and said it was important to maintain that.

In other business, Superintendent Dr. Mark Stamm gave the school board an education update about upcoming teacher and principal evaluations.

Starting in the fall of 2013, teachers will be evaluated on a new statewide system. By the fall of 2014, principals also will be.

The framework for teaching is not new, but will be adopted across the state. Teachers will be graded on planning and preparation, class environment, instruction and professional responsibility.

Each of those domains will be divided into 22 subcategories and teachers will be graded as failing, needs improvement, proficient and distinguished. Currently teachers are graded on a satisfactory or unsatisfactory level.

Stamm called the new system "comprehensive."

The two primary objections are quality assurance and to promote professional learning.

Currently the evaluation system is based all on observation.

As of next fall, teachers will be evaluated half on observation; 15 percent on building level data, which includes graduation rates and SAT scores; 15 percent on teacher specific data, which is over three years of impact achievement, and 20 percent on elective data, such as AP scores.

Schools will be going from a fairly straightforward - satisfactory, unsatisfactory - evaluation to a very comprehensive report, Stamm said.

Some of the benefits of the new evaluation will be the comprehensive descriptions, four performance domains, focused on input or instruction and outputs or student achievement.

The concerns are the time it will take to evaluate on the 22 individual categories, that the state Department of Education still is developing many of the components and how it is teacher specific, which will not take into evaluate departments, grade levels and buildings.

To combat the concern of it being teacher specific, random sampling of teaching and learning with walkthroughs already are in progress.

"We're working with a group of teachers developing this already," Stamm said.